It’s all Greek to Me
Athena returns to her temple
I am writing this on a patio on a hilltop outside a small village in rural Crete. The sun keeps ducking in and out from behind clouds, making me alternately hot and chilly. It’s a quiet morning, and the kids are working on school, while the Granos play backgammon.
In the distance, I can hear a dog, some roosters, and the bells around the next of the goats that keep down the grass in the olive groves up the road. A small cat the kids have named “Princess” refuses to leave me alone. I have made peace with it sitting on me as I persistently ignore it. I have to confess its purring and kneading my stomach with its paws is sort of endearing, for a cat.
“Princess” and I have come to an arrangement
I am definitely a city boy, an extrovert, and a high energy person, but after the hustle of city-hopping across the Balkans and history deep-diving in Athens, it’s very nice to have a more relaxed pace for a while.
Each morning some combination of us walks up the hills into the olive groves, stepping off the one and half-laned road periodically for farmers and the workers coming to do the early “organic” olive harvest. Crete has 30 million olive trees, more than the rest of Greece combined, and the fields stretch as far as the eye can see, blending into unkept hillsides and separated by unmortared stone walls in patterns I can't discern.
The Greek language bounces off my skull, and after a week I can still barely say thank you, hello, and cheers, which I find hugely frustrating. The signage thankfully usually also includes Latin letters along with the Greek, which I can puzzle through with my halting knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet, to which Greek is a distant cousin.
My mother and Theresa's brother Billy met us in Athens, and it was fun to hear our troop telling them the stories of our adventures and giving them travel tips. It really put some definition to how we are changing as we got to hear what surprised or delighted them.
Ava explaining to Gammy how to navigate the Athens Metro (“you look at the name at the end of the line on the map, and then find that sign in the station. Let's count stops!') is a memory I will treasure.
The kids put on a bit of a show of how mature and helpful they are, with Sophia leading the charge on dishes after dinner the second night Billy and Gammy were here, Paul cooking up eggs the next morning, and Ava acting as the sou-chef for multiple meals.
The parking lot was not well arranged, but Bill was undaunted. “Rangers Lead the Way!”
During the transition from Athens to Crete, our veteran traveler status was on full display as the usual flurry of travel hilarity (late cab, uncheckable bags, wrong rental car location, small rental cars with manual transmissions buried in a parking lot arranged by Salvador Dali) were navigated with a poise and level of coordination that comes with having done it before.
Crete is definitely among the most beautiful places I have ever been. The drive from the airport was full of breathtaking views, one after the other, and as the sun was setting my car was blasting a combination of music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that had my mom clapping, dancing, and occasionally crying with happiness.
It was hard not to drive off the road when this was the view
Dusk had us back off the highway on a series of roads that Sophia kept reminding me were "better than Albania!” We couldn't get a hold of our Air BnB host, and ended up halfway up a series of mountain paths that would have given me a heart attack two months ago (turns out right next to our ultimate destination), then back down to cell range, and then back up, following the half- English, half-Greek directions of a young woman we stopped on street.
Quickly tossing our bags in the rooms, we hopped back in the cars and headed to down to the little town we passed through just in time to catch a little family restaurant before it closed and grab groceries for breakfast.
In a pattern we have come to love, the waiter (son of the owners) practiced his English on us, occasionally translating interjections from the mom in the kitchen (“try the goat in tomato sauce- my specialty”) or the father, who came by with gifts of raki or homemade wine. We over-ordered, but took our time eating before heading back up the now less terrifying switchbacks, honking politely around insane curves, and home to the sleep of a long day, well-spent (after a quick dip in the pool for some).
I leave you with this…
